October 20, 2003

Doggy Style

A thought:

Isn't 'doggy style' sex what we would do if we didn't have porno? Somebody has got to be a doctor out there who knows the answer to this question. The very idea that the 'missionary position' is considered the natural, normal form of coitus suggests to me how deeply cultural we are in modern society.

This idea got stuck in my head today and I just couldn't wait to blog about it.

Posted by mbowen at October 20, 2003 09:46 PM

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Comments

Somebody here needs to see "Quest for Fire"! At least it tells a pretty good "Just-So" story about the missionary position, namely, that it was the invention of women looking for a better route to orgasm. We'll never know the truth of that, but what we *do* know is that human beings have been experimenting with as many ways to do the deed as you can imagine *at least* since the invention of agriculture and sedentary civilization. It's one of the basic arts of civilization, in fact--thinking up new ways to have sex. The predominance of the missionary position in modern times may have something to do with modern domesticity and patriarchal ideologies, I suppose, but the basic position has been around and relatively prevalent in the sexual repetoires of most human societies for a very, very long time.

What's more interesting is to look at what's gone definitively out of style. For example, one of the basic sexual techniques of Greek male-to-male sex was to lubricate the upper legs of a partner (usually an older man and an adolescent) and to rub the penis in between the legs. They don't teach that one much in safe sex workshops at present. I'd also venture to say that the stock of oral sex (all combinations) has risen dramatically in the last two hundred years or so--there certainly were societies in the past where that wasn't a very common sexual act.